Linux Users Have Had Enough...Here We Come

I've had it! I've been locked in for the last time. No longer will I sit idle and allow choices to be made FOR me. I make the choices around here. When I'm in the market for a printer, I don't want to have to think about which one to get. I want to be able to just go out, browse, pick one, and bring it home. Everything should just work right out of the box right? Wrong! You have to check the Linuxprinting.org Printer Database just to list out printers that you're allowed to buy...that is, if you want them to work with Linux. I say this is a crock. I say it is a sham. There are more than one operating system on the market, and it is high time that companies...large companies...start to understand this.

You've heard it all before I'm sure. My thoughts on this are no where near unique. However, I've been thinking quite a bit about this. Having been involved with a couple of new user friendly distros of Linux lately, I can assure you that printing is one of the main disqualifiers of Linux converts. It is VERY frustrating for a new user to not get that $200 CANON computer they just bought up and running with Linux when there is no driver for it. In a sense, Canon is dictating what operating system that person must run! To me, this isn't supportive of capitalism...it locks you into a certain OS. When was the last time you were locked into thinking a certain way and acting a certain way and having choices made for you? The only thing that comes to mind is McCarthism of the 1950's...and I don't think that's a hugely positive stain from America's sordid past.

How can we remedy this? Perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree writing emails and letters to the companies. Most of the letters I've written fall on deaf ears. The thing that these companies forget is that WE are the consumers...therefore, WE dictate the rise and fall of the market. WE push a product or pull it. Sure, they advertise like hell and try to sway us this way or that...but the ultimate choice lies with US...you and I. The ball is in our court.

Therefore, instead of just writing these emails and letters, perhaps a different type of action can be taken. An online petition.

Let's see what we can do to shake these manufacturers up. Let's start a petition where we can each vote and generically address ALL manufacturers and let them know that we won't take it anymore! Let's collect as many signatures as we can and show them that Linux is no longer a small player in the market. Let's force these guys into accepting their responsibility to provide us with a product that works REGARDLESS OF WHAT OS WE CHOOSE. Is anyone with me? If so, drop by the online petition I started today and add your name to the listing. Together, we can make a difference (corny I know...but true). Strength is in numbers. Let's show them how strong we are.

After signing this petition, spread the word to everyone you know. Emails, links to this article, links to the petition, call people on the phone, snail mail, telegram, morse code, and smoke signal to everyone and anyone you can think of to get support for this. Let's kick these manufacturers in the proverbial crotch. When the petition hits a mark of approximately 5,000 signatures...I'd say it would be a good time to start sending emails and letters to our printer manufacturers and let them know about our little petition. Perhaps you're thinking that companies won't repsond to these things...but rest assured, CNN has responded to these petitions before with apologies for their faulty action...so a printer manufacturer isn't a far stretch. Spread the word! Let's make this count!

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.